So What Is a Follower Bot?

Why Do Brands Hate Them?

Brands use influencer marketing as a powerful way to reach potential customers.

It’s extremely valuable for brands to have you recommend their product to your trusted audience. You’re an ‘influential customer’ who spreads the word about a brand you love.

But if bots have been used, in the eyes of the brand, this authenticity is tarnished.

When brands see a healthy follower number, it gives them confidence that not only is your content engaging enough to build an audience, but those potential customers are here to stay.

As soon as a bot starts to like and unlike, follow and unfollow, this casts doubt over whether or not your content is engaging enough. After all, your audience most likely followed you because you pretended to show interest in them.

How Do Bots Cost Me?

If you’ve ever had a random account follow you and then unfollow straight away, you’ve most likely been the victim of a bot.

Naturally, you unfollow them.

It’s because of this common reaction, bot-driven growth doesn’t last.

Worse yet, these bots generate fake engagement.

Which is why it’s against the Terms & Conditions of all social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook and Twitter’s) causing them to shut down third party bot providers.

Fake engagement is extremely bad for everyone.

But none more so, than the brands you hope to collaborate with.

Likes and comments prove that their investment into you, was worth it.

If you use bots, you’re releasing fake engagement into the ecosystem and brands will no longer tolerate it.

How Are Bots Detected?

Easily.

On TRIBE alone, your account is scanned by our AVS algorithm upon entry and then four times every day afterwards.

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Influencer Marketing is about to become the next Billion Dollar Industry, so as this channel takes up an increasingly larger share of marketing strategies, it's never been more important to ensure the platforms and agencies you work with are committed to the highest standard of integrity. TRIBE was built with these values in mind, which is why we we’ve always delivered content up front, the ultimate safety for any Brand. Not only do you get to ensure each piece of content aligns with your brand and strategy but you can also be confident that the content in your TRIBE inbox has been crafted by authentic influencers. We ensure this by running periodic scans on each and every Influencer on TRIBE to identify irregularities that might indicate fraudulent behaviour. In the earliest stages of TRIBE’s development, we created fake accounts that emulated the worst behaviour such as ripping content, buying engagement and using follower bots. The findings of this study were then dissected by our data science team who constructed a set of patterns and key indicators to identify fraudulent influencers. This became our proprietary Audience Vital Signs (AVS) algorithm. By scanning every influencer on entry into our network and multiple times per day we’re preventing any inauthentic accounts from entering our platform and more importantly, from entering your TRIBE inbox. So not only are you saving yourself time checking each influencer but your campaign budget goes further. We’re constantly refining and updating our AVS to make sure we’re picking up on any new fraudulent techniques so that we can maintain our platform integrity, and you have less to worry about! Today, there are four main components of our brand safety pledge. If you’d like to know more about each of these components, please click through to a more detailed explainer.